Dickens’s coinages
‘Dickens. Makes a change,’ said my husband, flopping a TLS on to the chair next to his whisky-drinking chair and turning to the free Telegraph television guide. The sarcasm was stingless, as we’re only in the second month of Dickens year, with plenty to enjoy.
I saw Dickens credited the other day with the invention of 265 new words. If you look at the Oxford English Dictionary it becomes clear that he did no such thing. In 258 cases, Dickens is the source of the earliest quotation illustrating the use of a word. This is often mistaken as evidence that an author invented it. Geoffrey Madan makes the error in his Notebooks, calling Byron the inventor of bored because a couplet from Don Juan is quoted in the OED: ‘Society is now one polished horde,/ Formed of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored.’
Even so, it is fun to play with the OED online, which lists the 258 words for which Dickens is the earliest cited author. His novels and, later, his published letters had been read through by volunteers, hence the 9,218 quotations from him in the dictionary. He is the 13th most quoted source, though 137th as a supplier of the first evidence for a word. Of his 258 citations, one comes from a piece he wrote jointly with that loud, wordy journalist Augustus Sala — not that it matters whether the one or the other first used petful in the sense of ‘pettish’.
It is inconceivable Dickens invented some words on his plate. One is sawbones. In Pickwick, Sam Weller says: ‘What! don’t you know what a Sawbones is, Sir? I thought every body know’d as a Sawbones was a Surgeon.’ No doubt many did. Dickens is even credited, in 1834, with Guinness. What did people thirsty for stout ask for in the first 75 years after its invention?
Some of the words are mere application of suffixes: wagonful, spongeless, soupy. Shriven is credited to him, though it figures often in the entry for shrive. Surely the way he used words, not his coinages, were the making of him. And one word attributed to Dickens probably never existed: tip-cheese, in Pickwick (chapter 33), referring to a boys’ game, and so perhaps a slip for tip-cat.
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